The Hobbit

In the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins resides in the calm area of Hobbiton, where he leads a slow and happy life. He is visited by Gandalf, one day and was offered the proposition of being a part of a journey to help a group of militant dwarfs reclaim there treasure. This is a prime example of the classic heroic journey. Piece by piece you can see the story follow the pattern set for it, Bilbos Innocent word of child hood is easily replaced by innocent world of peaceful village and the call to adventure is almost taken to literally with Gandalf calls(asks) Bilbo on a adventure (to help the dwarfs). The pattern thus follows the different "thresholds" or tests. The first, obviously being the trolls attacking and capturing them, and the belly of the whale is directly related to the cave Bilbo finds the ring in both literally and figuratively int a way.  The rest of the story follows the rest of the chart flawlessly and the story is almost predictable for this. You know that theres going to be another conflict of some sort because thats what the formula tells you. This to me makes the reading slightly less enjoyable. Theres no suprise in guessing what was going to happen next. In other books, such as next weeks harry potter it seemed to always be a suppress around the corner because there were no holds barred in minor and major plot twists. You knew Harry was going to get to voldemort in the end, but you didn't know how he got there or who was going to live or die, and there were defiantly some suppress deaths. With the hobbit, you can just take the chart and plug in any thing you want, trolls, dwarfs,ents, druids act act to the situations and you pretty much get what the hobbit is. This is to say, it is not a bad novel, Tolken takes the most elaborate world I have read and crams it perfectly into a digestible bit of the universe. He writes very well, and gives an immaculate descriptions of the surrounding and world. Which I throughly respect, but I would take character development over that most of the time.